ASUS U6Sg is a notebook with a lot of “first” features. It is a first 12-inch notebook with discrete graphics in ASUS product range and the first laptop in the fashionable U series with a built-in optical drive. It weights quite a bit, although as you will see from the review it is a pretty conditional characteristic...

Configuration

The ASUS U6Sg is based on an Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 processor with a clock rate of 2.4GHz (45nm Penryn core with 3 megabytes of shared L2 cache). The FSB frequency is 800MHz.

Intel Core 2 Duo T8300: cache memory

Besides Enhanced Intel SpeedStep technology that gives the notebook’s software and BIOS the control over the CPU frequency multiplier (to reduce it under low loads), this CPU supports Dynamic Power Coordination (the power consumption of the cores can be independently adjusted depending on the current load; one core may even slip into Deep Sleep mode with the lowest power consumption possible), FSB Frequency Switching (the FSB clock rate is automatically lowered at low loads), and Intel Dynamic Acceleration (this technology increases the frequency of the operating core in single-threaded environments; this is a kind of dynamic overclocking).

The notebook features the Intel Crestline PM965 chipset which offers a PCI Express x16 interface for an external graphics card. The South Bridge is the ICH8-M chip.

The Santa Rosa Refresh platform is made complete by the Intel Pro/Wireless 4965AGN adapter that supports 802.11a/b/g as well as the newest 802.11n. The latter standard is yet under development but already supported by a number of equipment such as Wi-Fi cards, access points, routers, etc. It provides a data-transfer rate up to 300Mbps.

This GPU is based on the G98 chip (although some programs report it to be a G86). The GeForce 9300M G is clocked at 400MHz and contains 16 streamed processors clocked at 800MHz. It is accompanied with 256 megabytes of dedicated GDDR2 memory clocked at 600MHz and accessed across a 64-bit bus. The GPU supports DirectX 10.0 Shader Model 4.0 and OpenGL 2.1 and also has a PCI Express 2.0 interface with support for PowerMizer technology.

Of course, this GPU is going to be slower than the GeForce 9500M GS as you will see shortly.

The U6Sg supports DDR2-667 SDRAM, the fastest memory available on the Santa Rosa platform. The memory subsystem works in dual-channel mode as reported by CPU-Z. You can upgrade the amount of system memory to 4 gigabytes if necessary.

Dual-channel memory mode

We measured the temperature of the hottest spots on the notebook’s surfaces with an infrared thermometer after it had worked for half an hour in PCMark Vantage (the ambient temperature remained constant at 22°C during this test) and got the following numbers:

LCD panel – 34°C

Keyboard – 33°C

Bottom panel – 37°C

Vent hole – 44°C

The following table lists the specifications of the U6Sg in comparison with its opponent ASUS M50Sv.